Protecting Privacy, Preventing Terror

A new, six-campus research effort, led by UMBC and funded by a five-year, $7.5
million Department of Defense grant sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research, hopes to turn the 9-11 Commission’s recommendations for better
sharing of classified intelligence data into a workable, secure technology network.

What makes the project unusual is that the researchers hope their work will both
help prevent future terror attacks and boost information security and privacy
for average citizens.

Many pieces of the 9-11 plot puzzle weren't recognized until after the attacks
due to inability or reluctance by intelligence agencies to share information. The
9-11 Commission Report recommended that the traditional U.S. intelligence
culture of “need to know” be shifted to “need to share.” The
challenge is getting the right information shared with the right people or agencies,
while making sure that classified intel doesn’t fall into the wrong hands,
foreign or domestic, or be misused.

The project is led by principal investigator and UMBC computer science professor Tim
Finin, whose ebiquity research
group specializes in deep data mining, security, privacy and new research
frontiers of the Web, blogs, Twitter, social media and other areas. According
to Finin, the new project should prove useful beyond the DOD sphere.

“There are plenty of real-world problems that we can work on that are not
classified, such as balancing patient privacy with making sure the right doctor
in an emergency can quickly access their medical records,” Finin said.

“Many of the principles of this research can apply to everyday scenarios
where information is shared with the right people and protected from the wrong
people, such as your location as determined by your cell phone, pictures from
the family photo albums on Flickr or the details of your credit history.”

The UMBC team is partnered with researchers from the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, University of Michigan, University of
Texas at San Antonio and University of Texas at Dallas. The grant was awarded
as part of the Department of Defense’s Multi-disciplinary University
Research Initiative (MURI) program.

“We want to create the science behind the idea of need to share,” said Anupam
Joshi, a key member of the ebiquity group and frequent research
partner of Finin. “We’ll be weighing what should be shared
with whom and asking if we can balance the utility of sharing something
with the risk of its getting disclosed,” said Joshi.

The project will develop new ways for organizations and individuals to express
policies for sharing information that can be automatically understood and enforced
by information systems. Such policies will go beyond existing data access
control mechanisms and 'digital rights management' schemes in their power to
include a wider range of situational constraints and the ability to specify
limitations on how the data can be used.